Thank you for attending the sessions of last week (17-19 July) introducing you to the various DB2 tools from IBM. Incase you missed attending the live event, video recordings are present under the "Media Gallery" link.

Let me go over some of the questions that were asked during the session on licensing:

Q) What is the licensing cost of OPM?
A) OPM and other tools covered in the sessions during the conclave come packaged with DB2 Advanced Enterprise Server Edition (AESE) license. So if you have DB2 AESE license, then OPM license comes with it and you can install and use OPM. You can also buy individual OPM licenses and you would need to contact your company sales representative or follow the instructions on "Contact IBM" for procurement details.

Q) Can one installation of OPM be used to monitor multiple DBs? Including some LUW instances and some z/OS?
A) Yes. One installation of OPM can be used to monitor multiple DB instances across platforms (LUW or z/OS). There is some capacity planning that would need to be done so that the monitored DB as well as OPM performance is not hit by monitoring multiple instances. Please refer to the OPM Capacity Planning guide for further details.

Please also refer to the following documents for more details on the capabilities and features of InfoSphere Optim Performance Manager:

While continuously working with some of the customers on the issues that they were facing with managing DB2, we have noticed that there is less awareness with customer about various solutions that are availabale to effectively manage the database and client applications.

The DB2 tools sub community is a step in the direction of spreading more awareness of the various tools and capabilities that can be used to improve productivity, improve performance of application and help put you in the driver seat to effectively manage the database system and sorrounding eco-system. We at IBM are committed to continuously bring some updates to ensure that you are more aware of such capabilities and use this knowledge back to help impact your business bottom line. We had a DB2 Tools conclave last month where we demonstrated a few of our tools from our DB2 tools portfolio. We will be doing more of such events in the future apart from communicating about new features time to time through this blog.

One question that we keep hearing from our engagement with customers is that they would like to hear more about the best practices for tuning and monitoring DB2 database system performance. Here is a recent article that has been written by DB2 performance experts and revised considering DB2 new releases DB2 V10 and V10.5 and our Pure Data for Operation Ananlytics (ISAS) systems.

One requirement after a PMR is opened could be to submit information for debugging to the IBM support team. In the case of InfoSphere Data Architect, this information would include - log file, patch [testfix] information, project files as applicable,memory settings in eclipse.ini and the RAM information.

Many a times, this would involve mail communications between the user and the support team to get the information from exact locations. However, from InfoSphere Data Architect v8.5.0, this has been simplified.

This is made possible through the Data collection and PMR Stamping feature available for InfoSphere Data Architect.

Starting with InfoSphere Data Architect v8.5.0, the product comes with a tool that would allow a user to submit information to a PMR very easily. The tool takes care of collecting all information based on need.

Assuming your install location is C:\IDA8.5.0\ then you will find a file

index.html

in C:\IDA8.5.0\isadc\ida

[If you wanted a cmd prompt version then please use isadc.bat for Windows and isadc.sh for Linux. ]

The screen would open asking to accept certificates. Please do so.

All that is left now is to click on the option you want. If you wanted to collect only the log file then choose as follows.

Choose the workspace of which you want to collect the log file.

The user then just has to enter his PMR number and submit the data.

This would attach the log file to the PMR.

If you had chosen the System information / Product configuration and testfixes, the details are directly written to the PMR text.

This redbook is divided in four neat parts. The first part discussed the strategy for performance management and discusses all the performance management solution to help you identify, diagnose, solve and prevent performance management issues in your environment. The first part also discussed at length on planning, installing and configuring the Optim Performance Manager.

The second part introduces OPM and OQWT and brings the most interesting discussion on finding and fixing database level bottlenecks, which in nutshell covers the most frequently asked question on how to consume these tooling and data in different dashboards and reports. The third part touches the performance management in a distributed environment i.e. DPF and pureScale wherein it touches the information that can help you do performance analysis on these type of systems.

The final part covers some of the specific topics such as implementing workload management using OPM UI and out of box support for monitoring packaged based application systems like SAP, IBM Websphere, IBM Cognos, IBM InfoSphere DataStage and InfoSphere SQL Warehouse applications.